How do I use AI to draft and research law without getting burned?

You draft and research with AI now, but a confident, wrong answer already burned you, and you do not fully trust your own check on it anymore. In law that fear is well-placed, a hallucinated citation or a missed nuance is not a small error, it is your name and a client's case. So hold onto the caution. It is professional judgment, not paranoia. The tool is fast and it is not reliable on truth. It will invent cases and state wrong things with total confidence. So it can draft and it can point you somewhere, but it can never be the authority. Every citation, every proposition it gives you has to be verified against the real source before it means anything. That verification is the practice of law; it is not optional. So set one unbreakable rule: nothing the AI produces goes out until you have confirmed it independently. This week, take one AI-drafted piece and check every authority in it by hand. That discipline is what keeps you safe, and it is exactly the judgment a client is paying a lawyer, not a machine, to provide.